


Dusk

by Bushwah



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (movie)
Genre: Ambiguous Slash, Assassins & Hitmen, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Consent, Gallows Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Not Canon Compliant, Other, Past Brainwashing, Past Torture, Relationship Negotiation, Spies & Secret Agents, Trust Issues, Victim Blaming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-08-09 14:58:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16452089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bushwah/pseuds/Bushwah
Summary: Bucky’s lip twitched in a smile. “You always tried enough for any three men. Not staying behind in a war zone to look for your buddy’s corpse isn’t letting him down,” he declaimed, “and I can tell you that for a fact, because I’m the corpse.”





	1. Bucky and Steve

**Author's Note:**

> Tagging both / and & because if I can't tell whether they're dating, I figure other people can probably read it either way -- as in canon, they love each other deeply, but it's not clear in what dimensions.

“At some point we’ll have to figure out what-all happened. We’ve got to get you stable first, of course—”

“‘Stable’—Stevie, you’ve got it all wrong. I’m fine. I’m not the one who was killed. I’m not the one who—”

_had her eyes ripped out was taken away from his family watched their child tortured to death in front of them had limbs torn off_

_the one was different, he still had it, really_

“—was hurt.”

“Yes, you were. They made you...”

“No more than anybody else who was taken under the draft. I was fighting for the wrong side, is all, and—I’ve defected now. You don’t have to believe me, of course, but _I_ know. I’m okay now, Stevie. I remember.”

“What did they _say_ to you?” His voice was broken up.

Bucky shrugged. “That the work I was doing was important and necessary, and had been approved by a democratic process. Pretty obvious lies, when you think about it, but. Well. I didn’t do much thinking, that was my problem.”

“Bucky—”

“I think the cryo might have done something to my memory, actually—it all goes in fits and starts. Or not. War is like that. Remember, Stevie? You were a soldier too.”

Bucky could see Steve trying to muster up a protest and put a hand on his arm. “You wanted to know what happened? If you’re going to use the information for anything, you’ll want to connect a lie detector first—”

“Bucky, stop.”

“—I know polygraphs aren’t reliable ’cause they detect regular stress and can be fooled by drugs, but I know a guy who has a model that’s designed for use during interrogation—”

“Bucky,” and the word was more than half a sob. “I trust you. You’re my first, best friend. We’ve been through too much for... for any of that. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know what for.”

“Sorry anyway. I... you said you were stable, but...”

Bucky followed his eyes, then looked down. “It’s just mine.”

Steve grabbed the hem of Bucky’s shirt jerkily, then looked up. At Bucky’s nod, he lifted the shirt to expose the laceration. “It’s closed, but with the serum—that’s more recent than our fight? Bucky, did something—”

“It’s nothing. You know mine’s the knockoff anyway. It’s not your fault,” he said, warming to the topic; “I was trying to kill you.”

“I didn’t save you,” Steve whispered.

“Yes, you did.”

“Not before. Not when it really mattered.”

“You’re really going to blame yourself for that? Steve, you thought I was dead.”

“I should have known. Do you know I felt it? I felt you still alive. But it was impossible, so...” His eyes were big and blue and painfully sincere. “I didn’t even try.”

Bucky’s lip twitched in a smile. “You always tried enough for any three men. Not staying behind in a war zone to look for your buddy’s corpse isn’t letting him down,” he declaimed, “and I can tell you that for a fact, because I’m the corpse.”

Somehow they ended up in each other’s arms after that. At first Bucky used his metal arm to hold himself up so as to not put too much weight on Steve, but then he remembered that Steve wasn’t liable to be bowled over by a light breeze these days and half-lay on top of him, eyes closed.

“Stevie,” he muttered, and Steve went stiff in his arms. “I know you’re worried about me, but can you promise me something?”

“What is it, Buck?” His voice was steady again, though the tension had yet to fade.

“Don’t let your big fool heart get in the way of doing what’s right. I had— _have_ —victims, Steve. There’s families that lost children to the Winter Soldier—living families. People who I failed. Don’t get so caught up in protecting me that you forget that I’m, that I’m a murderer.”

Incongruously, Steve relaxed at that. “That wasn’t you, Bucky,” but the Winter Soldier was already shaking his head.

“Like I said, I defected. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I’m not two people, Stevie. I’m on your side now, but I’ll always be, well, someone with a past.”

As if realizing that they were wrapped around each other, Steve pulled away. “I don’t know everything that happened, but I don’t need to. You’re a good guy, Bucky. You were confused for a while, but you’re better now.”

“That’s what I was saying. You don’t have to worry about me.”

Steve let out a huff of breath, and it was so quintessentially _Steve_ that Bucky dissolved into a fit of giggles.

When he looked up, Steve was looking at the sky in concern. “Given that you... ‘defected’... I don’t suppose you have a place to stay? It’s going to be dark soon, and, well, I’ve been staying with someone, Tony, a—”

“Tony? Tony Stark?”

“Yeah, you—you know him?”

Yes and no. “You can meet me—” Bucky glanced around at the alley. “Here is okay. At dawn, maybe, if you still like getting up at that kind of hour.”

“But where will you—?”

“There’s places the cops don’t look.”

“On the street, then,” Steve said grimly.

“Yeah? I mean... even the cops don’t usually come in shooting.”

“No. You’ve lost blood. You said you didn’t need to go to the hospital, but I’m not leaving you alone on the street. We’re putting you up in a hotel.”

“Oh, it’s ‘we’ now, huh? Punk.”

“Jerk.”

“You didn’t win our last fight,” Bucky said, smiling to take the sting out of it. “What makes you think you’ll succeed in putting me in a hotel?”

“I’ll get a place on the first floor and give you the key, and leave the window open. If you want to sleep on the street you can, and if you change your mind, you can come on in. Through the door if you want, or if you’d rather not deal with people—”

Bucky drew back and looked at Steve consideringly. “You never did give up on me,” he said wistfully. “I don’t deserve you.”

There was a pause.

“So,” Steve said at last, “d’ya want to come along to the hotel?”

“Yeah. And—your window idea was clever, but it’s less about people and more about the cameras; I don’t know what-all S.H.I.E.L.D. has access to, and I don’t want to attract attention. In that vein—if you give me a minute I’ll cover the arm.”

Steve watched silently as Bucky tucked his metal arm under his shirt and produced a too-big hoodie from his knapsack. When he was done, he made a passable amputee.

“There. Now we can go.”


	2. Steve

It was too big to see all at the same time.

Maybe Steve was missing pieces, but it felt just as likely that the whole picture was right in front of him and he just wasn’t able to look. All he could focus on was a mixture of fragments and, increasingly, speculation.

He called up the memory of the fight on the helicarrier, the Winter Soldier silent and deadly. His hair in his eyes—Bucky’s hair had been long, before the war, but he never let it get in his face. The uniform—someone had given it to him. He hadn’t recognized Steve, at first. His own Steve.

And he was so young. How was he so young?

Hydra infiltrating S.H.I.E.L.D. Bucky speaking of S.H.I.E.L.D. as if he knew them as an enemy. Had he really defected, or had he escaped? Who had told him to kill Steve?

How had he survived? How had Steve not known?

He had fallen off a train. Had anyone ever fallen that far and survived?

Did he get the serum before the fall, or after? Where did the arm come from? How had he stayed, wherever he was, without coming into contact with the world? It was hard enough to keep a soldier imprisoned for months, let alone decades.

And, no, he was the Winter Soldier. A known, a feared assassin. He had been out... to kill people. Innocent people, whom he named “his victims.” How could _Bucky_ have become a serial killer? The kind of man who could slaughter civilians without breaking stride?

He must have been changed somehow. The Winter Soldier wasn’t really him. He was lying to himself, when he said it was.

And speaking of lies—

What had Bucky said? “I know a guy”—he’d specifically mentioned _interrogation_. There wasn’t time for him to have made a new contact, since everything. One of the people he’d been with, one of his captors, must have...

Bucky had offered pieces of his soul to be put under a microscope. Steve had barely had to ask before words were pouring out of him. Did he want to talk? Was he in some way looking to confess—looking for resolution, closure?

There were two threads in what Bucky was saying, really, Steve thought. The side that said “I should know because I’m the corpse”—the confident, almost gleefully self-deprecating man Steve remembered from the army, returned against all odds from another war he’d fought alone and somehow won. And the side that expected Steve to need some kind of special lie detector to know Bucky hadn’t betrayed him.

“I’m not two people,” Bucky had said. And maybe he wasn’t. Maybe the duality Steve had seen earlier that night was nothing more than paired impulses in a single man. But the Winter Soldier was something else; something fundamentally incompatible with who Steve knew Bucky was.

He’d mentioned cryo.

That explained how he’d gotten from then to now... and yet it only brought more questions. The cryostasis machines took vast amounts of electricity. Steve had been kept frozen by the American government, with military funding. Had the Winter Soldier been preserved by a government? If so, which one?

The metal arm. It had a mark on it. Steve tried to remember what it was—a red sun? That would indicate Japan. Had the Japanese government, or some element thereof, held Bucky somewhere—underground, or isolated—tapping huge amounts of power for some secret operation? Sent him to America to kill Steve?

Why would Japan send Bucky to kill Steve on behalf of S.H.I.E.L.D. that was also HYDRA?

Steve sighed and sat up from his bed, where he had been staring at the ceiling. He needed a pen and paper. That was always best for problems that were too big to solve in your head.


	3. Bucky and the Winter Soldier

Leaning against the wall of the hotel room, the Winter Soldier rested.

With another operative to cover him, he would have taken the bed for at least a shift, but this way he would not have to take time to get up if it became necessary to flee or fight. He had verified the window and door as exits; as Steve had offered, he’d gotten a first-floor room.

It was good to be—not safe—but in a place that had no obvious dangers. He had gone into the hotel as a homeless veteran who’d gotten a surprising amount of cash, from a kind stranger or possibly a drug deal, and taken the opportunity to get off the street for the night.

It wasn’t even false. That was the best kind of cover. He had chosen a large population he could blend into with minimal deception, and then refused to give any more cross-factors than necessary.

He could be identified by the government and raided. The people he’d betrayed could come for him, or the people he’d hurt. But the chance was low. His most likely next contact was Steve: Steve in the alley; Steve who was, for the moment, the only person on his side.

He shifted against the wall, glanced once more at the lock on the door, and let his breathing slow.

When the quality of the light and sound from the city outside changed, signaling the approach of dawn, the Winter Soldier detached from the wall. Bucky shook himself lightly, glanced at the closed window, and prepared to leave.

He pulled the covers off the bed and sloppily remade it. There was enough diversity of habits among his chosen population that there was no need to be particularly precise in his acting, but it would be out of character to leave the bed he’d rented untouched. He checked his weapons to be sure they were in order; they were.

When he’d gotten out of the hotel, he went first to the place where Steve had given him the money, under a tree down the street. They had been standing side by side. Bucky stopped at the spot where Steve had been.

He looked around himself, trying to fix in his mind a phantom Bucky across from him; imagine how the world had looked last night. A car whirred by behind him. The streetlights were still on, but the stars were fading. It must have been much like this.

He stayed there until the sky grew bright above him and the streetlights blinked off.

It was a brisk walk back to the alley. Although he arrived before true dawn, Steve was waiting for him—sitting against a wall with one hand resting on a red cloth bag and the other tapping the edge of his shield.

Steve looked up as Bucky sat down next to him on the opposite side from the bag. “Oh—good morning.”

Bucky shrugged. “I said I’d be here. Don’t think anyone noticed me.” He hesitated. “You said—you had a place? With—”

“Tony Stark, yes. It’s his really, but I figured—I mean, we’re allowed to bring guests.”

_Not this guest._ But better to find out sooner than later; even he would need to sleep eventually, and whatever place Steve had secured for himself in this new world was the obvious place to start. “All right,” he said nonchalantly. “Take me there. To Stark, and—” His voice caught. “Home.”


	4. Steve and Bucky

Steve had a sort of deja vu hearing Bucky say that. They’d always shared housing as much as the actual owners had let them, first growing up in Brooklyn in two apartments controlled by large families, and then in various military accommodations. Never both at once—they had the Constitution to thank for that, and for Ma Rogers and Janet Barnes only having to shelter two soldiers between them.

Even now, Steve’s housing is determined by someone else, and although, like before, he will bring Bucky with him whatever it takes, that may present its own problems.

“You don’t have to,” he said inanely. “I’d help you settle anywhere if that’s what you wanted.” But Bucky was already shaking his head.

“This is where you live,” he said. “It’s best I stay near you.”

Steve wasn’t about to argue with that. “Let’s go, then. I can let you in, and if Tony’s there, I’ll talk to him.”

Bucky allowed himself to be led out of the narrow streets of the manufacturing district to a major throughway. Steve checked the intersection and turned to him. “It’s a good hour’s walk. Would you rather take the subway?”

“The street is fine,” Bucky said. He strode purposefully forward, and this time Steve was the one who followed.

He made the same turn Steve would have, which was surprising up until the nostalgia hit him like a wave. _We should have had this_ , he thought. _We should have had this all along. We should have always been bringing each other home._

Unerringly they headed toward Stark Tower. Steve wasn’t paying attention; something in his chest felt hot and tight, as if he were barely managing to hold back tears.

That’s how he missed when Bucky led him wrong.

The first thing he noticed was the change in Bucky. It reminded him instinctively of the drop from resting to combat ready, and he froze and made a half-turn to cover his partner’s back before he realized that Bucky was looking at him, not at an attacker.

“What’s going on, Buck?” he said quietly, making sure to keep his hands in sight.

Bucky looked away, still tense. “You didn’t warn me,” he muttered.

“Warn you about what?”

Bucky half-smiled, briefly; then he was serious again. “That you were staying in a, a prominent building. I’m sorry I took you past it—” Steve noticed abruptly that they were indeed several blocks away from the intended destination, although parts of Stark Tower were still visible “—but I wasn't thinking, I just saw, saw something I didn’t expect and I bugged out.”

“It’s okay,” Steve said. “You don’t have to justify yourself to me.”

Bucky tensed again at that, but then settled. “Well. Is your... Is Tony the only administrator of the building?”

Steve stopped to think.

“The top one, I mean,” Bucky clarified. “I’m not concerned about—” he stopped short, then rallied. “About the janitors for the lobby.”

Steve smiled involuntarily. “I’m still not sure what you’re asking about. Take it from the top? What do you mean by ‘administrator’? He owns the building.”

Bucky took on a look of intense concentration. “There is an aspect of the current situation that I do not understand.”

Steve nodded for him to go on. When it became clear Bucky was not going to speak, he prompted, “What is it?”

“What position,” Bucky said, “am I intended to take with respect to the law?”

“The law?” Steve blinked. “Are we doing something illegal?” He thought he’d pushed the city government into backing off from their attempts to harass vagrants for ‘loitering,’ but there was always a new misdemeanor.

“I’m _wanted_ ,” Bucky hissed. “Do you intend to turn me in?”

“No!” Steve said reflexively. “You threw it off; you refused to kill me. It wasn’t you.” He’d become increasingly sure of that over the course of the night. Perhaps Bucky could have decided to kill civilians willingly. It’s difficult to know someone, really know them, to face the truth what they’re capable of unflinchingly—but he didn’t need to.

The person he’d fought _hadn’t been_ Bucky. Hadn’t even recognized the name. Something else had been put into the body of his friend.

Bucky blinked slowly and stretched his hands. Mustering patience; Steve had seen him do it a thousand times before. He tried not to stare at the metal arm.

“Do you intend,” Bucky said carefully, “to allow me to be arrested?”

Steve wanted to say _no_ again, but he was beginning to think clearly again. He believed with all his heart that the Bucky who stood before him now was innocent of the Winter Soldier’s crimes, and he would do what he could to give Bucky the chance to prove it; but when it came down to it, he believed in the rule of law, and the idea of using his political clout to help someone he happened to favor to evade justice turned his stomach.

“Not,” he said, equally carefully, “for anything I know you have done; and not for anything I believe you would be willing to do.”

Bucky laughed outright at that.

“That is,” Steve added hastily, realizing that from Bucky’s guilty perspective this was unlikely to be reassuring, “I don’t intend to allow you to be arrested today, for anything you’ve done before today. The past—is, and it will have to be addressed eventually—but for today, my concern is you. I’d like,” he said gently, “to get you somewhere safe. Is Stark Tower... not that?”

Bucky’s brows folded together. “Safe,” he repeated.

“What did you see?” _I saw something I didn’t expect._ “At Stark Tower—was it something in particular, or—”

Bucky smiled tightly. Steve stopped.

“The people seemed nervous. As if they were in a place of great value, that they had not been before, or did not go frequently.” He gestured vaguely. “I am not qualified to disguise myself against so many angles at once... without more preparation.”

_So he’s afraid of being identified._ “Do you really think it’s likely that someone in the lobby would recognize you?”

“No,” Bucky said, his eyes narrowing in concentration. “The atmosphere reminded me of a bank, or, or a courtroom. I had believed such places, places where people act that way, were usually—extensively monitored. It is much easier to identify a person using a static image than through unaided human memory. My current appearance has not substantially interacted with you and has not been observed engaged in illegal activity.”

To Steve, Bucky didn’t look so much different from before, but he suspected there was little Bucky could do to disguise himself from him.

“I avoided the place because I assumed that recovery from that situation would be easier than recovery from the inverse situation.” He looked small, curling in on himself. “I am aware that I deceived you. I am willing to make it up to you.”


End file.
